Home Economics

Here's a lovely, happy photo of my three cheeky children together. It's a couple of years old now, and it amazes me just how much they have all changed so much in that short space of time. Grace, on the right, is now quite the young lady, soon to be 16, and at the moment she is very busy with studying for her GCSEs. Alice is so much more grown up looking than she was in this photo - she's not a chubby little girl any more. And Archie - well, he is now 4, and quite a handful.

They are lovely kids though, and all of them different in character, but very alike in some ways. They are all very caring, they each have a great sense of humour, and would do anything for each other.

As this blog is supposed to be primarily about baking - I was just thinking about each of the children, and how different they are about wanting to cook. As long as he gets to lick the bowl or have some goodies, Archie loves to help. He will get his little booster stool and hop up to watch me and get involved........ constantly hinting that "those sweeties look nice" or "that icing looks yummmmmy". As for Alice, well - she is happy to do any job for me, as long as she is getting her hands dirty and messy. There is nothing she likes more than the mucky jobs, and where I will find any way, tool or piece of machinery to prevent me getting messy hands, Alice will just want to dive right in there and get gunky. She has always been the same, and I remember when she was small and at nursery she would ask to do painting..........and then be content to just paint her hands with layer upon layer of coloured paint. Then there's Grace. Quite different to the other two - she doesn't help in the kitchen, and has no interest in cooking at the moment whatsoever. I have tried to encourage her, and include her with various different projects - and it wasn't until recently that she told me the reason she hated anything to do with cooking............ the cleaning up afterwards. She said that it did look like it might be fun, but that she had seen me clearing up after a cooking session, and it was NOT for her.

When I was at school, we did Home Economics, and learnt all sorts of things about cooking, running a home, catering for different diets and needs, and how to "bake from scratch". I am now 43, so it really isn't that long ago that I was at school. I am thankful that we had those lessons at school, because it was through those that I learnt to love cooking. I can remember the very first thing we made - stuffed eggs. It was basically just mixing hard boiled egg yolk with mayonnaise and tuna, then piping it back into the hollowed out egg whites. But, from that first lesson, I was hooked. We learnt how to make all sorts of things - choux pastry, puff pastry, cakes, savoury dishes....... Wednesday nights were frequently spent eating the results of my latest Home Economics lesson for dinner.

I didn't realise that things had changed so much in schools until my daughters started secondary school. No longer was Home Economics on the curriculum. No longer was it something they did every week, until they decided whether or not to take it at exam level. Now, they have it mixed in with "Textiles and Resistant Materials", and they do it for a term a year. That means that in the three years Grace took it, she only actually had cookery lessons for about 30 weeks, and practical lessons for less than half of that time.

She came home one day and told me they needed to take in the ingredients to make an apple pie. I was preparing myself to rummage around and find lots of little plastic containers for the various things she would need..............until she gave me the shopping list of things they had been told to get. I don't know if you will be as shocked as I was, but this is what was on the list:

1 tin of apple pie filling
1 packet of frozen pastry

Another time, they were going to be doing fairy cakes. By this time, I thought I was prepared for anything - and as I LOVE to make cakes (and so know how very easy it is to whip up a batch of fairy cakes!) I had everything to hand.................................... or so I thought. The list of ingredients was as follows:

1 packet of ready made fairy cakes (or home made ones if you prefer)
1 packet of roll out icing
various sweets and decorations


Now, I'm not a super intelligent person, I don't get paid heaps of money to advise the public about healthy eating, I don't analyse statistics about how obese our children are becoming, I'm not able to have a TV programme or head up a campaign to make school dinners healthier. BUT - I CAN see that if we want our children to live healthier futures, we have to TEACH THEM how to cook healthy things, how to recognise a balanced diet and include things that are good for them. I think that Jamie Oliver should use his high profile and influence to do something about implementing some sort of change to the curriculum in our schools, and teach the next generation how to cook properly - and not to think that to make an apple pie all you need is a tin of pie filling and a pack of frozen pastry!

Love is in the air.....

Today, I thought I'd show you some old cake photos - well, not THAT old - from just around Valentine's Day. The big heart shaped cake was made as a raffle prize for a fundraising event went to at the local village primary school. It was a really fun evening - a Mr & Mrs Night.... where couples competed against each other to see how well they knew each other. Some of the questions and challenges were a real test for the couples.....and I am so glad that I was just a member of the audience!

The other cakes were made as part of a gift for my Mum's birthday (which is on February 9th). I made lots of cakes (so I could try out a new cake stand - more photos another time!) and she took lots home with her..........including a little pack I made for her next door neighbour....a delightful lady who has had a bad time of it lately one way and another. I made the little fabric basket that the cakes are in - and she can either use it for little odds and ends.........or send it back to me for a refill of cakes!

It's cold and rainy and horrible here today - just the day to stay in and snuggle up by the fire with a good book, or an old film on the tele, or both .......... with a cuppa and some cake! Of course, I have to make the cake first............so I think I shall go and do that now.

Bob the Builder Cakes

I like to put photos on here (adds a bit of excitement to the dreary boredom of my writing!), and, although most of them won't be brand new, they are things that mean something to me. These two are of two VERY difference Bob the Builder cakes I recently made.

There's quite a funny story behind it. Somebody asked me if I would make a Bob cake for her little boy, Albert, which I agreed to do. I found and bought a book - for inspiration AND modelling help - all about Bob the Builder cakes. So far so good.............. until my now 4 year old (at the time 3 year old!), Archie, got hold of the book, went right through it, and decided he wanted me to make him the "snowball" cake for his birthday (which was on 28 Jan). I kept trying to put him off, offer him various alternatives, bribe him - anything........... but he was insistent. It HAD to be the snowball cake. Which to me, looked like the most difficult thing in the world. I was worrying over it so much. One of my friends even suggested I could make it an avalanche cake - just a BIG heap on a board.

Well, I tackled it - and, as you can see, it came out OK....................but I am glad it was only for one of "my own" - and not for a paying customer!!!! Archie was thrilled with it, and that's the main thing.

On another note, I am sitting here waiting (in the cold) for the boiler repair man to arrive. Last night, as I went to wash up, there was no hot water. I KNEW we couldn't possibly have run out of oil - it was only delivered last week. Anyway, the heating was working, so it wasn't that. So, I rang my WONDERFUL neighbour, Rob (you'll hear lots about him over the weeks and months, no doubt - he rescues me from all sorts of fixes!) who said it sounded like a valve had gone wrong, and that I needed to call the repair man. There we were, thanking goodness that we still had heating............when I noticed that the radiators were getting HOTTER AND HOTTER - so I had to turn the heating off too. I guess it might be more than one valve that needs fixing or replacing................ but I should find out today, as the repair man is coming over asap.

Welcome to my blog!

Hello and WELCOME. I'm really not sure that anyone but me will ever read this, but anyway - it will keep me busy (as if I don't have enough to do that already!). Hopefully this will be more than just a diary for me - I am hoping that this will be somewhere I can waffle on about the cakes and cupcakes I LOVE making.

I originally started decorating cakes when I was little more than a child (I know that sounds corny, but it's true!). I can remember making and decorating a Christmas cake when I was about 11 or 12...using royal icing in peaks to look like snow, those little plastic snowmen (yes, this WAS the 70s!!!) and some tin foil placed to look like a pond!

I carried on making cakes for fun (and for family members) and kept promising myself I would take some classes, until in 1992 - I was getting married. So, I decided (foolishly, I now realise, looking back) to make my own wedding cake. I found a wonderful shop that offered lessons in Sugarcraft, and I took several courses, in how to use fondant icing properly, how to make wedding cakes, and how to make sugar flowers. I eventually finished my wedding cake the night before the wedding (no Hen Night for me!!), and it was lovely - but it was something that someone else should have been worrying about on my wedding day - as the bride, I should have been getting myself ready, not setting up a cake at the venue a couple of hours before I was due in church. Oh well, you live and learn.

On the run up to the wedding, I had been getting as much practice as possible, making cakes for colleages and friends (who very generously paid me to do this - even though my attempts weren't that good at first). Just over a year after I got married, I gave birth to my gorgeous baby girl Grace, so I kind of let the cakes slip a bit - although I carried on making them for her and then my other daughter Alice, after she was was born in 1995.

Over the years, I've gone from one crafting project to the next, enjoying lots of them, and wanting to find something to make some extra money - when all the time, cakes were staring me in the face! I started up again a year or two ago, after discovering there was a cupcake craze that didn't seem to be going away. It hadn't really "hit" Essex, so I thought I'd make some and see how they went down at local school events and Christmas Fayres. The answer is - they were admired and enjoyed by lots of people (most of whom didn't know I had ever had a hidden passion for making and decorating cakes), and this gave me confidence to carry on.

This year seems to be more "cakey" than ever, and I am making more and more cakes, which I am really enjoying.

As for the future - well, it would be my absolute dream to have a successful business selling my creations, but we'll have to wait and see. At the moment, my main problem is that I don't have the self-confidence to charge people what I should for cakes, so the "successful business" is still a dream, and I guess will be until I get tough enough (or confident enough, or busy enough) to charge more. Well, as I said earlier, we live and learn, so "watch this blog" and hopefully 2009 will be the year I start to make my dream a reality.

I want to use this blog to showcase some of my creations, and I will always welcome feedback and comments - and if anyone is local to me, I would LOVE to let you have samples of my cakes so that you can (hopefully) verify that they taste good too. There's nothing worse than the promise of a scrummy cake by the look of it, only to be disappointed with the flavour or texture.